A nonprofit veterans group has "squandered" hundreds of thousands of dollars of the $17 million in federal funds it has received since 2001 and essentially abandoned its mission of helping veterans start small businesses, according to the results of a
Senate investigation (pdf) released Thursday and
reported in The Washington Post.
The National Veterans Business Development Corp. grossly mismanaged taxpayer dollars -- including lavish spending on costly dinners and luxury hotels, first-class travel, and compensation for its top two executives that amounted to nearly a quarter of the charity's federal funds, according to the report.
The top lawmakers on the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee -- Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) recommended that the veterans' group receive no more federal funds and that instead the funding go to the Small Business Administration's Office of Veterans Business Development.
Posted by Raymund Flandez
A Senate investigation into a nonprofit that was designed to help veterans start a small business found that its executives wasted “hundreds of thousands of dollars of the $17 million in federal funds it has received since 2001,” the Washington Post
first reported last week.
The probe
found gross mismanagement and lavish spending by the National Veterans Business Development Corp., which is better known as the Veterans Corp. Taxpayer dollars were spent on “extravagant dinners, luxury hotels, first class travel, high executive salaries, ineffective programs, and other dubious expenditures,” according to a statement put out by the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. In all, the Veterans Corp., a federally chartered, nonprofit corporation, spent only 15% of its funding since it was created in 1999 on the national network of small-business centers designed to assist veteran entrepreneurs. Last year, it only spent 9% of its budget.
The results have upset Congress, and members are recommending that the Veterans Corp. no longer receive federal funding.
“This investigation made me angry as someone who has worn the uniform of my country,” said Senator John F. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, in a statement. “… Our veterans put their lives on the line for our freedom, and we owe them our full support when they return home. Certainly the more than 25 million veterans in our country deserve better than this.”
You can read the Senate committee investigation report, by clicking here.
With close to 200,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan and hundreds of thousands more world-wide, the number of new veterans is expected to increase dramatically in the next few years, the report says. “Helping veterans start or grow small businesses is a crucial component of reintegrating them into civilian life,” the report states.
You can read the Senate committee investigation report, by clicking
here.
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